THE GROUNDS OF THE BELOVED COLLEGE
"Deep horror then my vitals froze."
I did not know that a bureau with its closed drawers contained so much creaking. It seemed a self-starter. A mid-night lunch had been made ready. I was usually fond of the pleasures of the table, but this repast was the least welcome of any I ever tasted. I needed no artificial aid to keep awake. I was far removed from drowsiness. My eyes would not be surprised at anything in that presence except sleep. This night seemed as much too long as all other nights seemed to me too short, but I sat it out alone till the day, to my inexpressible relief, dawned over the distant fields. Soon after I reached my room some of my associates called me to wake me for breakfast. "You didn't suppose I was asleep, did you?" Lord Brougham pretended to die in order to read what was said of him in the papers. At Athens, Alabama, a minister preached his own funeral sermon for he said, "I know my own faults and my own good points as nobody else knows and I am not going to have people after I am gone talking of a thing they don't understand." The whole affair was arranged as if it had been the real thing, with the minister's family in the pew in deepest mourning. By very much of what I had been reading, and by more, that all along I had been hearing, while my motives were well enough in volunteering my services as a watcher, yet I was surprised to find how ill-fitted I was for the office. The minds of ingenuous childhood would not now be subjected to quite so much frightfulness. There seems to be something in them when well stirred up, that responds with fearful alacrity to that kind of address. It can be found any time in children if one has the lamentable disposition to try to appeal to it. By an unintended combination of circumstances I had been supplied with uncommon numbers of ghost stories until I was afraid to be out alone, particularly in some localities where it was extra dark.
On leaving the neighbor's house for home I would induce someone to stand in the door until I, after moving rapidly, should shout back that I was safe.
Stepping Into the Past
The bogy-man in the cellar is not conjured with in governing children now as much as formerly, still a child likes those plays best which give a good deal of exercise to the imagination. So on the other hand the ills we imagine afflict us most. The microscope magnifies the object without altering it. How the thoughts of those troubled times of long ago come trooping over the hills and valleys of memory after so many years have been passed to our account in the book of the Recording Angel. There are some sights that we can never forget. Some occurrences are so scenic and suggestive that they come home unbidden to every man's heart and are with him in the market and on the street.
The College Empire
When I first came on the campus the students' rooms were bare and uninviting. No freshman's room was carpeted. A mat in front of his desk and one in front of his bed, a very plain bureau, three or four chairs, a wash-stand, pail, pitcher and bowl, and a few text-books made the outfit. An apartment was featured best by what it did not have. We lived the simple life. "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes." The new president came in the morning of an opening educational era, during which more improvements have been made than occurred in long centuries before. With great distinction he served his day and its sun sank before the horizon in its evening splendor and that of his youthful, buoyant successor rose in its morning glory. The initial steps or incidents in the election of the present sovereign if ever known are now lost to history. The event was so spontaneous and natural that we can only say in scriptural language, Now it came to pass. The vote was only a memorandum. It was what everyone wanted, everybody expected.
In my day we all knew one another. A college may be good as an institution of learning and still fall far short of supplying what we feel this elite college did for us. The elective system has not been wholly a blessing. If left to himself, a student might elect to follow the line of the least resistance. In one of these institutions the whole class never meets together after the first day for any academic purpose. The class is no longer the social unit it once was. No two men take exactly the same course.
Just How it Feels
A boy's relation to his home is changed the instant his feet betake themselves to classic ways. His face is set toward an independent career. It is a beginning of a detachment and the home is behind this program and perhaps without quite recognizing all the results and sacrifices that are involved. No family is ever again quite the same after it has a son graduated from college. The plane of life is lifted all around. The kind of atmosphere in which he must live and move and have his being, for four years, will affect him. The traditions and the predominant type of student character will give him a pull which it is hoped is in the right direction. Where the majority of the students are disposed to do right, and to make a serious use of their great opportunities, the chances are that the graduate will feel his life long that he paid his tuition to the college, when he was for a fact most indebted to his associates. All testimony shows that students recite to the faculty and learn from one another. We are well beyond the old heresy that a boy goes to college for his mental training, enters society for his social life, and the church for his religious development. The college ideal, as stated, is to give a boy opportunity to do for himself the best he can do, also to do for each student the best that can be done for him and to give all possible advantage to the poorest student.
Just Plain Friends
We all drank at the same fountain and felt the thrill of the same spirit. There was no caste or social class. We may well doubt whether higher life success would have attended us, if we launched from a different port. An earnest endeavor was made to put a young man on an equality with the demands of his time. It undertook to furnish a basis from which it was possible for him to advance himself to that level of usefulness, in his generation, to which his native gifts relegated him. The college cannot undertake to supply brains. In the presence of stupidity even the gods are powerless. I do not need to praise the college. As Cromwell said of his government, "This is a thing that speaks loudly for itself." Webster made, in the greatest address ever delivered to a jury, much of the proverb, Murder will out, but this is no peculiarity of murder. Character will out, mental discipline will out, education will out, and the lack of education will out. Without this item some vocations cannot be entered at all, and there is no vocation in which the mental training would not be a fine additional equipment.
Rekindled Fires
At my Alma Mater, on revisiting the earth, in conversation with friends the inquiry was altogether natural, at Commencement, as to how I would approach things, if I were to begin my studies again. I would try to remember that it is the intensity of the work that does the good. A horse needs, in practice, to be tested at his top speed. He must have the occasional fast mile to fit him for a real occasion. The mind requires to be tasked. The faculties ought then to be alert. The need is of "sinewy thinking." Gird up the loins of the mind. Pull yourself together. We read of One who, as he prayed, sweat. Study and have it over. Dawdling over a newspaper is the arch enemy of all this. When one reads he ought to read with attention. If, by this power, we throw our whole minds upon an important subject, we make it a prompt and easy matter of recollection. Genius is really intensity of thought, feeling, emotion, activity. All the faculties are in earnest. "A man is not educated, till he has the ability to summon, in case of emergency," said Webster, "all his mental power in vigorous exercise to effect his object." The great gain is in the undivided, intense mental power of application. Be all there. Play hard. To spend two hours on a lesson that could better be done in one is a suicidal process. The greatest benefit of study is the trained power to concentrate the faculties. What one sees, he ought to see strongly. The importance of this matter lies in the fact, that the habits which a student acquires while pursuing his studies, generally adhere to him through life.
If I could begin again, I would give my chief attention to disciplinary study. If a person has a fair library, as every man and woman should have, he would acquire information, daily, his life long. While a student, his aim should be discipline. It is a vice for him to spend so much time over fugitive ephemeral literature which is like the grass, in the morning it flourisheth, in the evening it withereth. After hard work, skimming over such gossipy literature as one finds in the papers may restore tone to the mind but it is not to be classed as reading, but as recreation. Its effect dies with the day that gave it birth.
Of all my studies, I have rejoiced most in the discipline acquired by the study of Latin. If I could go back and acquire early a classical enthusiasm I would make myself sure of the educational passion.
Fortune Keeps Her Own Secrets
There is a certain fluency of speech, fertility of expedient and power of application which a student should cultivate for what Lord Coke called the "occasion sudden." The appeal to students to aim at good public speaking, while in college, and to awaken then and there, the active powers of the soul, is based upon two observations: that Albert Beveridge like recent orators showed his gait while still in his university, and that such gifts are not ideal but practical and not studied merely for their own sake but because of their connection with our civil liberty. To attain an end so indispensable if, in my studies, I was worked out to my limit, I would incline to the discussion of questions that would not send me to the library but into the open air, themes on which I could prepare myself during a stroll, subjects that I could stick in the corner of a mirror to formulate while I shaved.
Why did not the negroes do more to help secure their own emancipation?
Can a man change his disposition?
Why do ministers that do not believe in the inspiration of the Bible use a text? A man will take a text and explain it away. Why did he choose it?
Is it the brain or the soul that does the thinking? Is our body the agent or is it a living spirit that uses the organisms? Is it the imagination whose wings uplift or am I at the center of the circle of my faculties making use of them?
Is there any causal relation between justice and victory in arms?
Some Social Features
This student life establishes certain relationships both with the institution, also with individuals which are felt to be the choicest holding of a man's whole later life. The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure gold. Here is a strong illustration of how deep and enduring are the attachments of an eager hearted boy. They are more ardent perhaps than they should have been, but there they are, and the college gains thus a token of attachment and tender recollection of unreturnable youth. The most exquisite, the most unforeseen, the most compensative feature of my life has been, my personal friendship with the professors. Some of them I admired extravagantly. Silhouetted upon my memory for all time is my first sight of Professor Leonard F. Parker. I remember a particular day when we gathered somewhat early for a Sabbath service. Some of us who were to be his pupils had no acquaintance with him even by sight. Assuming that the leading scholar of the place would attend the meeting it was for us a question of identification. Soon there came a man in the succession not a farmer, possibly a resident clergyman, and some of us thought it might be he. But something within me said "Query." I tried to make it into the professor.
A good man doubtless, but I wanted to see something in this worshiper that was not in him. He did not fill the picture. He did not make me say, It is enough. Soon there came a man who needed no badge, no signature, no guarantee. His face was an index of him. All of us joined in a common feeling of relief. We felt his presence. We knew that this was the man. The bearing of a professional man in those days was more sedate than now, occasioned by what he thought to be due to his professorship. He looked upon his office as a high and sacred calling, and it met all the ends of his ambition if he could be, not teaching students, but educating men and women. It is said of the Roman conquerors that they were so used to victory that they carried on their faces the secret of an imperial people who knew not defeat.
"Fixing Up"
There was an obvious neatness about him and a perfection of dress, which usually requires an absence of anything which draws attention to itself. He excelled all men whom I have ever known in the teaching profession for enkindling among his pupils an ardent zeal in their literary pursuits. A great personal force was needed in those days to teach disciplinary studies only, in an effective manner, and to dominate the industrial spirit and the trade spirit by those classical enthusiasms which were the joy and ornament of his youth. Mercantilism was unbridled in the general community, yet it is an acknowledged fact, that at the beginning the responsibility of the teacher has much to do with the success of the school. No teaching is worth much without enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is generated by concentrating interest at a focal point. One cannot teach for more than he is.
A little history is worth a great deal of opinion. By his unusual gifts, by his out-reaching personal sympathies, by the individual impress of a great teacher, many of his pupils became interested through him in the classics. Let him be judged by his product. I never hear President Main in one of those vigorous, fine-phrased, official statements, in language impressive, copious and beautiful, the outward sign of an inward grace, making a sort of an Iliad out of a routine college president's report, without saying to myself and to others,—That power of statement, discipline of mind, felicity of speech, the administration itself, if you please, are the fruitage of patient discipline acquired in his early and long study of Greek. Alexander of Macedon used to say that he owed his life to his father, but to his teacher, Aristotle, a greater debt, for it was that philosopher who taught him how to make the most of life. While the ability to teach is a treasure committed to earthly vessels, some are of finer clay than others.
He Had no Pet Virtue
The Professor was a natural leader, full of vision and initiative, whose heart was in his work, and the old college impulse never left him, and he represents a part of what has given a worthy name and character to the college. A man gets to do what he is fitted to do. I do not believe he will be allowed to come back from the other world to this but he will hardly know what to do with himself when separated from those interesting associations on which so much of his happiness depended. A father or mother or both would come to town, wander about the place, invariably in company with the object of their affection. These parents are not first of all astronomical, or philosophical, or mathematical, they are human, and they are not there to hear about the new water-works or the freshly paved streets, or the perfect miracle of an artificial lake. They are there because their treasure is, and a kind word spoken to them about their young hopeful is like a spark of fire upon tinder. These folks used to wait about the doors and walk the streets and hope to throw themselves in the Professor's way, with the idea that he would talk with them a little about their scion. I was once driving the distance between two railroads and a dark night and a continuous downpour of rain settled drearily upon me, and I was forced to stop at random at a farm house, and beg for entertainment. Disposing of my case in a few words, the family resumed its talk relative to a letter they had received from the Professor about their descendant in whom were centered great expectations. And when they had said everything that could be said, someone, as if by accident, would pull a string and let loose again the flood of talk about that letter. Someone, coming in, for a moment, out of the storm, would divert the attention, and then they would apply the flail again to that letter and thrash out some further kernels of wheat that they had not at first noticed. The family, of course, found out that I knew the Professor, and so, although I was to start in the morning while it was still dark, the mother was unexpectedly up, and had the table so spread, that she could at once sit down, when I did, and talk over her happiness and the rewards of her self-sacrifice in having a boy at college. She had hoped and believed all that had been written, and yet it was a great comfort to have the professor say it.
A Disposition to Build Tabernacles
He lived close to the people. When Christian, in the Pilgrim's Progress, found himself in the City of Destruction, he departed speedily out of it, whereas our professor would consider if the situation was remediless. I was present when he, having given the best of his life to the college, under the weight of his years, resigned. It was touching, as a great American author has pointed out, to see the new attitude that the community had taken toward him, putting him into a new relationship and into a new atmosphere, in which it was recognized that he was undeniably and irresistibly older than he had been. People had hardly thought that he was not a permanent feature. The evidences of Christianity stand very much in facts. I point to the fact of his consistent fruitful life and to the fact of his triumphant peaceful death. They make a fresh volume on the evidences of Christianity. I have heard of a man who had one foot in the grave, but here was a man who had one foot in heaven. Dear friend, and my father's friend, friend of my youth, and all my later years, teacher, counselor, encourager, model of my student life, to whom my heart was knit in all the ardor of the first enthusiasm over the idea of going to college, to whom my obligations are beyond computation, Thou hast thyself gone to sit at the feet of the Great Teacher.